


Unmoved

by PitFTW



Category: Gravity Falls, Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Beast Wirt, Bipper, Games, M/M, Waltzing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-28
Updated: 2015-09-28
Packaged: 2018-04-23 19:18:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4888906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PitFTW/pseuds/PitFTW
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was absolutely fascinating, really, how easily the boy had managed to adapt to The Unknown. While it certainly helped that he had been here before, overexposure to this place would drive anyone mad. Just take Quincey Endicott, for example; here was a man who had been pushed to the very brink of madness, who even after he found the identity of the supposed specter who haunted his home, he had continued to deteriorate until, in an act of uncharacteristic mercy, Wirt had asked Bipper to simply end everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unmoved

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my Tumblr (pitftw.tumbr.com) and sort of based on a headcanon I have regarding what would happen if Bipper had remained a permanent fixture and if Wirt had ended up as The Beast. You'll see glimpses of it throughout.
> 
> This story is a oneshot, however, I would be happy to continue exploring this world (Which yes, includes Mabel, Greg, the Grunkles, Beatrice, and many others!) if demand is high enough!

 

* * *

 

 

The Edelwood trees were sprouting again. 

Of course, it was not unusual for him to be absent from The Unknown for extended periods of time, but even then, very little tended to change. If anything, the reason why he often chose to fly and flit about Gravity Falls was  _because_  everything changed and  _because_  every single day gave him a new plaything to amuse himself with. Why, just last week, he had managed to strike up a deal with some lazy-eyed old hag, and-

The crunch of snow behind him shook the dream demon from his reverie. He paused for a moment, listening. There was some sort of hissing in the air, like a cloak trailing upon the freshly fallen snow- or better yet, feet being dragged through it. The very air seemed to hum with a soft melody, a sweet little tune that struck the heart with both joy- and despair. Here was the tune of O Holy Night, but also the thrum of an axe, the dying soprano of a child, and of course, the harsh, screeching creak of the Edelwood trees. 

Yellow eyes, pupils slit and black, like a snake’s, blinked owlishly before a wide, unbridled smile appeared on his face. There was no doubt about it; his dear old pal was nearby, and what better way to chase away the cheer of the snow than to welcome him with open arms? Provided, he still wasn’t quite sure how sturdy his latest (and certainly, his most deluxe) meat puppet was, but if humans could survive sitting for hours on end staring at a tiny screen, then surely they would be able to survive hugging an entity known for being the harbinger of death for all who surrender themselves to the wood, right? 

He turned around when the crunch of the snow beneath worn shoes came to a halt behind him, leaving only the creaking of the Edelwood and the quiet hum of the forest. But now new sound joined them: the soft, nearly inaudible squeak of a lantern’s handle as it swayed gently to and fro. Unable to help himself, the dream demon let out a small laugh as he turned to face the lantern bearer, smile bright, arms wide-open. 

“Good to see you again, Cone Head! Or should I be calling you Beast instead?”

The lantern bearer had a name, of course, and the demon very well knew it. After all, who could ever forget the name of the man- nay,  _boy_ \- who had risen up and defeated The Beast, all to save his brother? Well, that is to say, the  _first_  Beast to haunt the Woods of the Unknown. Things that the dream demon didn’t known nor care about had happened in between the brothers’ escape and now, resulting in the elder brother- Wirt, the Beast Slayer or The Pilgrim, whatever those tavern-goers liked to call him- taking up the lantern and with it, The Beast’s role in The Unknown. 

Wirt took a step forward, his tattered cloak billowing around him when the wind picked up. In the demon’s opinion, it gave him a rather nice and sort of menacing effect, almost to the point where he would have taken the new Beast half-seriously, if it weren’t for that stupid giant red dunce cap on his head. If anything, it was  _because_  of that stupid cap that he was surprised anyone around here still feared The Beast. It was one thing to be forced to carry around your soul like a purse, but another thing entirely to attempt to appear large and menacing when you looked more like a giant gnome than anything. 

That wasn’t to say, of course, that he wasn’t menacing on his own (minus the dunce cap). He was tall- at least a head taller than the demon’s current meat puppet- and would no doubt tower over most children, his primary targets. His eyes, long ago narrowed and darkened with apathy, glowed a million whorls of colors as they scanned the area around him. In one hand, he held his lantern; in the other, he held a sharp hatchet, still splattered with a few drops of the black oil that kept him alive. Perhaps most terrifying (or silliest, depending on how you looked at it) of all were the branches- they grew out the sides of his head, twisting until they stuck out like antlers, calling forth images of children writhing and curdling in pain as branches grew from them, inside them, through them, until their life essence was squeezed and beaten and ground into oil, the oil used to power the very lantern Wirt was forced to bear. 

“Bill,” Wirt replied as he stopped right in front of the demon, completely unbothered by the smile he received in return, so wide that it nearly split the demon’s puppet in two. His voice was just as gentle as it was when he first stepped into The Unknown- though now, it rang with the gentle echoes of the night wind and seemed to share the same creak as the Edelwood trees. “Or maybe I should just call you Bipper?”

Bipper only smiled some more, his smile so wide that it nearly squished his eyes. It was wonderful, how malleable a human face was. “Bipper to you, Cone Head! I’m both and neither! But I must say, the woods are looking lovely this time around. You’ve really outdone yourself! How many years has it been since I’ve been back here, anyways? Ten? Twenty?”

“A century,” Wirt said simply.  

It was absolutely fascinating, really, how easily the boy had managed to adapt to The Unknown. While it certainly helped that he had been here before, overexposure to this place would drive anyone mad. Just take Quincey Endicott, for example; here was a man who had been pushed to the very brink of madness, who even after he found the identity of the supposed specter who haunted his home, he had continued to deteriorate until, in an act of uncharacteristic mercy, Wirt had asked Bipper to simply end everything. 

But perhaps, a more accurate statement would be that he  _had_  been driven mad, just not in the way that the rest of The Unknown had been. He was not the sort that would throw rocks at bluebirds or teach a school full of animals, oh no; his madness went much deeper than that. For, as the years passed before him, Bipper watched in glee as the once determined, courageous spark in his eyes slowly crumbled and was snuffed out completely, to be replaced by the sort of apathy that only a thousand lifetimes of watching whole empires rise and fall would bring. He had held out for a long time- so long, in fact, that Bipper had actually wondered if he would remain that way forever- but eventually, all things surrendered to The Unknown. No one could escape it- not Wirt, not Dipper, not even the original Beast himself. 

“What are you doing here, Bipper?” Wirt asked, breaking the silence that had fallen between them. “You and I both know that your deals do not work here in The Unknown.” 

Bipper, for his part, yawned as he crossed his legs and lay on his stomach, all while floating in midair. The centuries in this body had allowed him to grow more accustomed with its limitations- and once he found those out, he had made efforts to get rid of them. This body was stronger, faster, and better than it ever had been under the sole possession of Dipper Pines. 

“Can’t a dream demon guy thing just come and visit an old friend?” he asked, feigning insult while fixing Wirt with his usual grin. “C’mon, Cone Head, I thought you were at least more polite than the last Beast!” 

For a brief moment, Wirt’s lips thinned as he pressed them together, regarding Bipper with some strange mixture that seemed to land between apathy and annoyance. Of course, apathy was a pretty normal look for Wirt nowadays- the fact that the annoyance thing appeared was quite rare. In fact, Bipper was 99% sure that the guy had gone through exactly zero facial expressions since the last time they spoke. 

“Your last visit ended with The Unknown catching fire. The one before that, you drove Quincey Endicott mad. Before that, you drove a new, worse spirit into Lorna’s body. So many visits have ended in disaster, Bipper,” Wirt said lightly. “... Your first one ended with Beatrice’s death.” 

At that, Bipper smiled. “What’s wrong, Cone Head? Still nursing a crush?”

Wirt simply stared at him. “ _Since then- ‘tis Centuries- and yet/Feels shorter than the Day/I first surmised the Horse’s Heads/Were toward Eternity-”_

“I don’t speak Dickinson, Wirt,” Bipper groaned, rolling his eyes. “Say it in English, then  _maybe_  I’ll care.” he floated closer to the other now, nearly draping himself over the taller boy as he wrapped his arms around Wirt’s shoulders. 

Honestly, he wasn’t quite sure what he had been expecting; Bipper had just wanted to see what would happen if he had done that. Most humans would stiffen up, at the very least, or maybe even return the favor if they were comfortable. But not Wirt; Wirt simply stood there, staring straight at Bipper, apathetic as ever.

“The memory is still as vivid as it always has been,” Wirt said. He didn’t even bother moving in an attempt to throw Bipper off. The nerve of him! “But I can only relive it so many times before everything just doesn’t matter anymore.” 

He made a little more of an effort now, floating on his back, arms behind his head as he all but lay himself right into Wirt’s arms. Well, at least, where his arms would have been if he actually were to carry the dream demon. It was a little hard, after all, when all the new Beast did was stand there holding an axe and a lantern like he owned the place.

“C’mon, don’t tell me that you’ve lost  _everything_ ,” Bipper said, smirking up at him through half-lidded eyes. He was going to get  _something_  from the other boy today, because this was fun and Gravity Falls could only take so much of his games without completely imploding on itself. “Humans are some of the most stubborn things in the universe! You probably held onto your humanity or whatever and are just trying to hide it because you’re scared or something.”

“Whether or not my humanity is still here means nothing,” Wirt said. He rolled his shoulders in what was likely the world’s most uncaring shrug. “Any human that wanders into The Unknown will become lost. And I have no intention to do so.”

“You’re spewing out stupider and stupider lines with every visit, you know that?” Bipper asked as he once again floated on his stomach, this time moving up high enough so that he could take Wirt’s cheeks in the palm of his hands. The lantern bearer’s face was ice-cold to the touch, yet smoother than ice itself. It was as though he were made of porcelain, with eyes of gleaming pearl to match. “Why don’t you just cut the poetry crap and start wreaking some havoc? All of this subtle stalking and stuff... talk about boring! Or better yet, just hand the place to me! No one likes you anyways, so it isn’t like anyone’s gonna miss ya.” 

He had expected something, anything from the boy in front of him, whether it was laughter or anger. Hell, he was just about ready to start tickling The Beast (As Mabel had displayed during the fateful puppet show, it was an effective weapon against human vessels). But one look in the multi-faceted, dull eyes of his companion told him everything: he didn’t care, would never care, and honestly probably agreed with him. It was infuriating, to say the least! 

“Believe what you like to believe, Bipper,” Wirt said, giving him yet another one of those infuriating shrugs. “But as long as the oil of the Edelwood keeps me alive, I will continue ruling this realm.” and, with nary another word, he turned on his heel and exited the clearing, his tattered cloak leaving a few snowflakes in his wake.

 

* * *

 

 

It became a game for Bipper- or rather, a quest- to gain some sort of expression from Wirt. Oh, he would try everything, from tackling The Beast and tickling him to stealing his cap, but nothing worked. It seemed that the teenager was much more stubborn than the old Beast could ever be, and he would be damned if he was going to let some former  _human_  win! 

His pranks soon turned dangerous, ranging from letting loose a horde of terrible beasts to prey on the people of Pottsfield to slowly and methodically plucking the feathers from a family of bluebirds he happened to stumble upon in the woods. At one point, he even managed to steal Wirt’s lantern and set an Edelwood tree on fire, only for The Beast himself to arrive and simply put it out with some sort of strange mechanism he rigged that siphoned water from a nearby river to put out the fire. The tree itself did not survive, but just enough of its oil lasted so that by the time it ran out, Wirt had already managed to lead another three children into the dark of The Unknown.

He then took to ruining as many of Wirt’s victims as possible, popping out whenever they were nearby and scaring them out of their wits. When he realized that scaring them into the woods only made it that much easier for Wirt to make them get lost, he attempted to become the polite young traveling companion instead. Ah, but that didn’t work out too well either; apparently, something about glowing yellow snake-eyes scared kids a lot. 

Even following Wirt around on his wanderings proved to be fruitless, as all the teenager really did was either ignore Bipper or strike up a long conversation with him, which usually ended with either Bipper laughing too hard to continue, or him floating off somewhere to let out steam. Now, that wasn’t that he  _enjoyed_  these little talks or anything; Hell, he was sure that it was all that Dipper side of him’s fault that he was doing this game at all. His Bill side would’ve found something way more fun by now, but stupid determination, and-

“You’re doing it again.”

Bipper squeaked, nearly falling out of his position in the tree when the voice spoke up. Grumbling a little, he glared down at the ground, where Wirt was looking back up at him. If the teen had anything left in him, the expression swimming under the apathetic layer bordered something along the lines of amusement. 

“What do you want, Cone Head?”

One of those stupid shrugs. “You’re staring up at nothing again. Are you finally bored of The Unknown?”

Bipper’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve  _been_  bored with it. Nothing to do here, except sing, eat potatoes and molasses, and watch you chop wood. Blech!” 

There was a brief beat of silence. “... Okay then.” with that said and done, Wirt went back to where he was carefully stripping bits of the dark bark off the Edelwood tree. 

_Chop! Chop!_

Bipper scowled, then crossed his arms, turning his body so that his back was to the teenager. He didn’t need Wirt; he was his own man... dream demon... thing. He was the product of an ancient deal, a clever ruse that had ended in the ushering in of doom for Gravity Falls. It was his plaything now; he just needed to go back to it. 

_Chop! Chop!_

Perhaps this time, he would see how the Northwests were holding up. He had no need for their wealth, but it most certainly helped that they had heaps of gold hidden under their manor. Well, that is to say, if an underground bunker could be called a manor. It was a wonder that those people were still functional, considering that they had been nearly wiped out by the numerous Gravity Anomalies that came with Bipper’s victory.

_Chop! Chop! Chop!_

The noise was infuriating. Grinding his teeth, Bipper turned and leaped from his place, landing lightly next to Wirt, who was bent over chopping away. With a small growl, he snatched the axe away and threw it to the side, where it skidded to a halt next to the lantern that Wirt had carefully put down only moments before. The Beast halted in his chopping then, turning to Bipper with those same apathetic eyes, with that same apathetic expression, with that same, stupid, apathetic,  _handsome_  face that had haunted Bipper for these past God knows how long-! 

He was sick of it. He was sick of being ignored. He was sick of his every effort being tossed aside like trash. He was sick of knowing that, no matter how hard he tried, Wirt would remain as unmoved as ever. 

It was time to change that. 

He grabbed Wirt’s hand before either of them were fully aware what was happening. “Dance with me, Cone Head.” 

They moved in tandem, launching seamlessly into a waltz as they whirled away from the tree, the discarded axe, and the lantern glowing in the din. The dance was bizarre and twisted, some horrifying cross between anger and apathy. The snow and grass bowed in their wake, the tiny sticks of the Edelwood trees groaned and gave way under their rhythmic steps. Bipper found himself being lifted, twirled, dipped, and spun over every root, every bush, every pothole as though they did not exist. He was floating without floating, dreaming while wide awake, and- somehow-  _free_  despite being chained. 

Wirt seemed to morph and twist in the dim light of the lantern, sometimes a shadow gliding over the snow, sometimes a man stepping over roots, sometimes some strange creature in-between. Every so often, the shadows upon his face would grow dark and gnarled, as though he himself were made of the trees that kept his soul aflame. In the uncertain light, Bipper was unable to make out an expression, but like the teenager, it seemed to dance, sometimes flitting from apathy, sometimes hovering their before the shadows hid the handsome face from view. 

He wasn’t sure how long they danced, but like all things, it eventually came to an end. Bipper found himself dipped low one last time, so close to the ground that the back of his hat became lightly caked in snow. Wirt, once again the very picture of apathy, lifted him up and helped him regain his footing. Despite the completely neutral expression on his face, the teenager was panting lightly, face flushed a gentle hue of pink from the exertion. Despite chopping and carrying the Edelwood every single day, he still became tired from a mere dance; the very thought made Bipper giggle with glee.

Before he knew it, he was leaning in, and then his lips were pressing against a soft, gentle warmth. For a moment, all time froze as he registered what happened, as Wirt’s dull eyes widened for a brief moment, and as the warmth began to spread. Wirt’s lips, unlike his skin, were as warm as any human’s, despite the cold. They gently began to mold and move with Bipper’s lips, sending gentle thrums through the demon’s being. This was what Gravity Falls could not grant him. This was why he kept returning to The Unknown. This was-

He blinked and shoved himself away, nearly shoving the taller boy over as he did so. Trembling, he mumbled something that sounded like a cross between a farewell and an apology, before scrambling to find his footing in midair. The moment he did, he shot off, not looking back, not even shouting at the other when he would be back. 

In spite of himself, he knew he would be back. It didn’t take a genius to know that this... this whatever it was could not be left unfinished. Bipper may be playful, but he is not sloppy, dammit! 

Behind him, Wirt smiled. 


End file.
